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13 thoughts on “Apple – stuck in the ’50s?”

I’ve wondered about this myself, but apparently the building is intended to hold 12,000 employees, so a 2000-space garage isn’t nearly as big as it sounds. And the Globe doesn’t mention the underground bus terminal.

More accurately they’re stuck in the 2010s. In Silicon Valley, cars are a current reality and no amount of Steve-Jobs-level reality distortion will make them go away in this decade. Yes, big companies like Apple aren’t constrained by public transit and have private bus systems which can launch new busses whenever they want. But no, Apple isn’t big enough to send busses everywhere their employees live, an area several times the size of metro Vancouver. But I’d bet that there’s a plan in place to repurpose that space as car use drops.

I guess it’s the suburban-campus/industrial park idea that seems so dated — the amount of energy required to move all those people back and forth — so 20th century. But I’ve never understood why old-fashioned “telecommuting” didn’t catch on more than it has.

People have to meet face to face and tele-commuting has its limit in idea creation or collaborative environments like SW development. I bet that plenty of Apple folks tele-commute and are not in their office all the time. However, running a 10,000 person campus, like a real university campus, need physical space and frequent face-to-face contact. Ask yourself: why do schools or universities still exists if in theory everyone is just glued to their screen at home.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Microsoft isn’t any better with their suburban Redmond campus. The founders of both Apple and MS are suburban children of the 60s and 70s, and living / working downtown wasn’t high in their collective consciousness, no matter that the ads portray a scruffy college youth next to a suburban geek suit.

Electronic Arts and at least one high-end techy business park took the MS Redmond campus as inspiration for their Burnaby loci. MS does have a contradictory branch office above Nordstrom’s in downtown. I take that as a next generation thing.